1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a safety apparatus to provide vital information regarding the location of a child, invalid, elderly person or other occupants. More particularly, the present invention relates to a safety alarm and visible indicator for providing pertinent information concerning the location of occupants to firefighters or other rescuers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Every year thousands of lives are lost due to the outbreak of fires in private dwellings as well as business offices. In this regard, fire safety in the home is an important issue that has received much attention. Smoke detectors have been designed to inform occupants of the home that a fire has broken out. Other detectors, such as Carbon Monoxide detectors, have also been developed to alert occupants of a dangerous or potentially life threatening condition. As such, we may consider for ease of description or convenience, referring to all detectors as smoke detectors.
The smoke detector is typically a standalone device mounted to the ceiling that includes e.g., smoke detector means and alarm sounder means which sounds an audible alarm that alerts occupants of the emergency condition. Typically, but not always, a smoke detector has a built in light that illuminates the immediate area, when the alarm is sounded, in order to assist the occupants in their escape from the building. The smoke detector may be powered e.g., by DC 9V battery, or rechargeable battery or the buildings AC supply.
When it is not possible for an occupant to exit the building, the occupant must be rescued by rescue personnel such as local fire fighters. However, by the time fire fighters arrive at the incident, the dwelling or building is often filled with smoke and the fire fighters may have to make an informed guess as to which rooms of the dwelling are likely to be occupied. Unfortunately, it often happens that a fire fighter will make a valiant effort to gain access to a smoke filled room only to find that this room is unoccupied. The time taken to reach the empty room not only endangers the lives of the occupants in other parts of the building and the life of the fire fighter but also wastes precious time needed to locate those occupants in other parts of the building, generally in smoked filled rooms.
Accordingly, various approaches have been developed to signal the location of the occupants in the home to the rescue personnel. One such approach, “the tot finder” decal, was promoted by the fire services for a number of years. Parents were encouraged to attach the reflective stickers, the decals, to the windows of their children's rooms. In theory, during a response to a fire, the firefighter would be able to identify the room of a child and conduct a search of that room for the child.
As will be appreciated, the decal approach has a number of problems. First, during a fire or smoke or other emergency condition, especially at night, the decal may not be readily visible, especially if it is old and faded. Second, the window decal only indicated the location of the child's room, not that the child or anyone was in the room. Third, children do not always stay in the same room, especially as they grow and mature. Fourth, people have been known to forget to remove the decals from the windows when the child has changed rooms, moved out or the family has moved and another family has moved in. As is appreciated by those skilled in the art, these situations put firefighters or other rescue personnel at risk in their attempt to enter a room identified by the decal as a child's room, when no such child is in the room, as well as delaying the rescue and putting at risk occupants located elsewhere in the building.
Other apparatus have been developed to identify occupants of a building during an emergency, fire, smoke, carbon monoxide safety hazard condition, but all are either cumbersome or expensive.